The Write Stuff: Don’t be Cute

September 2018

Don’t be Cute

By Alan Crawford,
Impact Editor

I haven’t read all of it, and maybe I won’t, but Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a useful, lively and entertaining book.

King explains early on that it isn’t just the great literary geniuses — Gustav Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, David Sedaris — who think important thoughts about writing effective prose. Popular writers do too, and what they have to offer might actually be more relevant to the rest of us mere plodders than anything Henry James could say. Popular writers are popular for a reason. That people enjoy reading what they write means that on some level they write well. There are some exceptions, of course. Like James Patterson. He’s just awful.

Anyway, King’s attention to craft, rather than art, is a good sign in itself, since it is enough for most of us to become competent craftsmen, rather than actual artists. With that in mind, King says he prefers short and familiar words to long and unusual ones, unless there’s a good reason to use a long and unusual one. Often, there is, but make sure of it before you go there.

In addition to being the editor of Impact, Alan Crawford is a published author and journalist. His latest book, How Not to Get Rich, looks at the financial misadventures of Mark Twain.

Use the vocabulary you already have, King writes. Notice that he doesn’t say “employ” the vocabulary you already have. “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones,” he says. “This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person committing this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”

Premeditated cuteness isn’t the problem in most public affairs writing, and that’s good. The problem — and this is Alan talking — is a self-conscious (or worse, mindless) attempt to sound technical or scientific, which results in leaden and robotic phrases like “data-driven consumer marketing platform.” Writing passages like that, to borrow from King’s example, is like outfitting a Chihuahua in plate armor and expecting it to dance. It probably won’t cooperate.

ANNOYING WORD OF THE MONTH. Around. There’s nothing wrong with the word around, of course, unless it becomes a default synonym for about. From The Intercept: “‘I am a capitalist to my bones,’ Warren said recently, in response to the conversation around democratic socialism.” Why around instead of about? Can anyone explain this to me?